Women’s Cooperatives: More Than Just A Workplace

        Cooperatives provide women with the support and resources to become financially independent without inhibiting their individual identity.  Artisans with specific skills are encouraged to start their own businesses with help and support from the coop.  Their products are sold at fair trade prices and are often marketed by the coop to international retailers.  When evaluating economic growth in the context of reducing poverty, inequality and social justice, it is evident that cooperatives create direct opportunities for the poor to earn enough money to sustain a decent level of living.

Over the last few years women’s cooperatives have become more than a workplace.  Case studies show that the cooperative movement can alleviate poverty both by providing the basic needs of the poor and by tackling some of the causes of poverty. They help to solve housing needs, improve access to capital, mobilize savings, develop women's potential in generating income and improve health and nutrition.  Many of the women involved in coops have lived through unspeakable atrocities and violence.  The coops have offered these women a support group where they can heal from these horrible acts and hopefully move forward. 

In the Congo, women’s coops not only help women to become financially independent, but they serve as a place for survivors of the war that has plagued the Congolese population since the 1990’s to tell their individual stories about how they were affected by the conflict.  The process of discussing what they went through to the other members of the coop, who share similar experiences, serves to put closure to these horrible episodes and allow them to move on.

In one of these Congolese coops a woman named Clara recently told her story.  She was tied to a tree and blindfolded.  She listened to her sister sobbing and screaming while armed men violently raped her.  She waited in terror knowing that she was next.  After the rape both women were beaten and left to die.  Clara survived.  She attributes the women’s coop as instrumental to her recovery.  Today she has a profitable soap business and has enough money to be able to send her son to school.  The cooperative has allowed her to take charge of her life and look to the future.